by M. J. Trow
‘Gentlemen,’ said Mr Bolland, junior counsel for the prosecution at the trial of Thistlewood. ‘Thank Heaven that Providence which kindly watches over the acts and thoughts of men, mercifully interposed between the conception of this abominable plot and its completion.’
But Providence and Heaven had nothing to do with it. The Privy Council were up all night on 23 February and none of them – not even Lord Harrowby – was at Grosvenor Square. Even though Thistlewood was under arrest by the time the Gazette appeared, he was not when Sidmouth sent them his note. And when exactly did Sidmouth find out that it was Thistlewood who had killed Smithers? And whatever happened to that word ‘alleged’ which is enshrined in English law? In other words, Thistlewood’s neck was in the noose before any legal decision had been made and twelve police officers and a piquet of the 2nd Coldstream Guards were despatched to a run-down cowshed in an obscure street . . . on the off-chance of preventing a revolution? And how was the Bow Street magistrate Richard Birnie able to swear out a warrant for precisely those men found in the hayloft?
The real conspirators in the Cato Street story were their lordships of the Privy Council.
Chapter 11
‘On a Charge of High Treason’
They held an inquest on Richard Smithers on Friday 25th. It would be another half century before coroners had their own buildings for inquest purposes and the Horse and Groom, where the Bow Street officer’s body had been laid out, was used instead. With the usual pomp and ceremony, Mr Pyall, the beadle of St Mary-le-bone proclaimed proceedings open and the Middlesex county coroner, James Stirling, took his seat.
The police surgeon, Mr Fisher, talked the jury through Smithers’s wounds. He had not been called until that morning, by which time the dead man would have been stripped and washed and rigor mortis would have come and gone. Smithers was ‘a good-looking man, stout, about thirty three years of age’. The fatal wound, two inches long and half an inch broad, had been made between the fifth and sixth ribs on the right side to a depth of about twelve inches. The ‘sharp instrument’ had grazed the surface of the liver, cut the pericardium and pierced the right ventricle of the heart and the left lobe of the lung. The ribs on the left side had prevented the weapon passing right through the body. Death was caused by loss of blood. Other wounds to the body included a second sword cut under the shoulder blade and a pewter pistol ball imbedded in the shoulder to a depth of six inches. Unless Thistlewood hit him twice, it is likely that these wounds occurred in the chaos of darkness after Smithers fell.
George Ruthven was called next and explained events in the hay-loft, from the time he had received the warrant of arrest from the Marlborough Street magistrate, Mr Baker, to the end of the affray. He was very keen to underline the presence of Thistlewood – ‘I knew him as well as I know my father’ – and the fact that it was Thistlewood alone who offered violence in the hay-loft before the lights went out. This was the first time that the conspirators’ names were used – John Shaw, ‘a man named Blackburn [sic]’, James Wilson, and Tidd, who ‘fired at a sergeant’ as well as at Fitzclarence. It cannot have done the Runners’ credibility much good when Ruthven admitted that, of the twenty-five men in the stable, only nine were taken into custody. He estimated that about twenty shots were fired, but some of these were probably just to cause alarm.
James Ellis gave his evidence next, giving his address as 22 Paradise Row, Palmer’s Village, St Margaret’s, Westminster, confirming that it was Thistlewood who stabbed Smithers and that he, Ellis, had fired at the man and missed. He also lamented that the short cutlasses that the Runners carried were useless against the longer weapons of experts like Thistlewood.
William Westcott came next, his address at 10 Simmons Street, Sloan Square, explaining how he had grappled with Ings, still wearing his butcher’s apron, and how both he and Thistlewood had got away in the confusion.
Giles Moy, of 11 London Court, Marylebone, was a nightwatchman. He assisted Brookes in capturing Ings and took him to the watch house. The butcher had bullets in his pockets, gunpowder and a haversack (for the head of Castlereagh or Sidmouth).
Sergeant Legge of the 2nd Battalion the Coldstream Guards explained the turning out of the piquet ‘usually employed on occasions when the military is required in aid of the civil power’. He showed the jury his ripped jacket sleeve where a pistol ball had torn the cloth, the pistol fired by Richard Tidd. Legge had time to check the hay-loft, find the body of Smithers and to return to Portman Street for reinforcements. Clearly, no one knew the extent of the insurrection or how many more armed killers roamed the streets. He mentioned the names of Monument, Cooper and Gilchrist.
The coroner reminded the jury of the law of joint culpability. It may have been Thistlewood who killed Smithers, but the law held that all his confederates were equally guilty.1 At that point, a note arrived from Magistrate Baker referring to the original warrant he had sworn out. At that point in the inquest, it was still in the hands of the Privy Council.
The next witness has caused confusion. The text clearly calls him William Sarnon and he gives his address as the Edgware Road and his profession as tailor. He appeared to be merely passing Cato Street about 8 o’clock and got caught up in the fighting, being fired on at least twice. On the other hand, Ruthven refers to a Runner called John Surman who was with him that evening. The similarity of surname may be just a coincidence.
All this was enough for the jury, who pronounced Thistlewood and Davidson guilty of murder. They asked the coroner for clarification on the issue of joint culpability and whether surrendering without a struggle carried any weight. Told it did not, a murder verdict was brought against the rest of the prisoners ‘and others unknown’.
During the day, Smithers’s parents arrived to visit the body. They were ‘so decrepit as scarcely to be able to get up the stairs’. Smithers’s body was removed to his lodgings in Carteret Street and the funeral took place at 4 o’clock on Thursday 2 March. It was a moving and well attended ceremony, proof of the shock that Cato Street had caused to London’s people. The Runner’s widow was too distraught to attend, so the principal mourners, walking solemnly in deepest black behind the hearse, were Smithers’s father and brothers and a large body of Bow Street Runners. John Lavender represented Smithers’s earlier police office in Queen Square and Mr Armstrong and his son from Worship Street were there too. The upper windows of the cortege route were full of spectators, as the sad column wound its way from Tothill Street to St Margaret’s church. Here, while the Reverend Rodber held the service, the churchyard was crammed with sympathizers, including magistrates, policemen and a contingent of the Coldstream Guards.
Days before this the machinery of the law swung into motion. Two of the conspirators, Robert Adams, ‘late of the Royal Horse Guards’ and the tailor Abel Hall, offered to turn king’s evidence, a system which we would call a ‘deal’ today; they would live in exchange for all they knew about the others. Hall was not grabbed at Cato Street, but was arrested by Runners at a house in Seward Street. A quantity of weapons, presumed to be part of the conspirators’ stash, was found in an old shed of a house in Regent’s Park. On Monday 28 February, the Privy Council offered a reward of £200 for the apprehension of John Palin. Lavender and Bishop of the Bow Street office received information that he was holed up in the Battle Bridge area. When they reached the house, the bird had flown, but three men and ‘a woman of somewhat suspicious appearance’ were arrested. Since one of the men was lying in bed fully clothed and another was melting lead in a frying pan, police suspicions seem to have been justified, yet Magistrate Birnie let them go on the grounds that they were ‘unknown’.
This issue makes it clear that various members of the radical underground were known to the authorities and were actually being watched. Ruthven testified that the reason he knew Thistlewood so well was that he had ‘followed him for days together’. And since Thistlewood had been involved in Spa Fields, it followed that ‘the notorious Preston, the cobbling politici
an’ was up to his neck in it too. He was arrested on the 28th, his lodgings at 17 Prince’s Street, Drury Lane, having been searched days earlier. He had told officers that his ‘armoury could not boast of a swan-shot nor his port-folio of a scrap of paper of the slightest political interest’. He accepted arrest cheerfully as he’d been here before, but his daughters were furious at what today would be called an invasion of civil liberties. Moved from one watch house to another, Preston denied all knowledge of Cato Street and appeared before the Privy Council the next day. Here, according to the authorities, he ‘behaved with his usual boldness and low insolence’ in an interview lasting half an hour, before being taken to the Bridewell at Tothill Fields. Before he left the Council Chamber, Lord Castlereagh passed by – ‘Aye, there he goes!’ Preston called after him. ‘I have talked more treason, as they call it, today than ever I did in my whole life before.’
One of the man’s outraged daughters, Ann, wrote to Sidmouth and waited in the lobby of the Home Office for his reply, complaining of the treatment her father had received. Three days later, having been given the cold shoulder by Cam Hobhouse, she was allowed to give her father a change of clothes, but not to talk to him.
Another dissident who was rounded up was Samuel Waddington, known to be a placard-carrying trouble-maker who had tried to set up a rally on Kennington Common. He protested at the seizure of his books ‘with ridiculous effrontery’, claiming that he had done nothing which would merit a charge. All that was actually found was a full-length portrait of himself, blowing a horn and carrying Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash under his arm! George Wilkinson, writing all this at the end of the year, was happy to report that no charges were brought against Waddington and that he had given up politics for the ‘more quiet occupation of porter to a tallow chandler’.
On the day of Smithers’s funeral, the Privy Council were to discuss legal proceedings. The great and the good of national politics were at the Home Office including Robert Peel and William Huskisson, both of whom would become prominent members of the Cabinet in two years time, and Viscount Palmerston, the ‘terrible milord’ who would dominate foreign policy for half a century after this point. The next day, Mr Adkins, Governor of Coldbath Fields, brought the prisoners before their Lordships under heavy guard. Other conspirators, still at this stage including Preston, were brought by Mr Nodder from Tothill Fields. With them was Firth, the Cato Street loft keeper, who was assumed to be part of the conspiracy.
Handcuffed together and facing their accusers, the prisoners had a wretched appearance and some were mere boys. Thistlewood looked ‘jaundiced, nerveless and emaciated’. Davidson was cheerful enough. Preston was annoyed, but clearly enjoying the limelight. Again, a number of influential people trooped through the chamber to gawp at them.
One by one the prisoners were examined by the Council. Thistlewood put his hat on and refused to answer the charges of murder and high treason brought against him. Ings was sullen, but snapped, ‘It is want of food which has brought us here. Death would be a pleasure to me . . . if I had fifty necks, I’d rather have them all broken, one after the other, than see my children starve.’ Preston couldn’t wait – ‘If it is the will of the Author of the World that I should perish in the cause of freedom – his will, and not mine, be done!’ He threw his arms about ‘which savoured strongly of insanity’. Wilson, Davidson and Tidd laughed openly at the distinguished visitors, like Lord Westmoreland, who came to stare at them. Brunt, as Thistlewood’s supposed second-in-command, put his hat on and said nothing.
At the end of the day Thistlewood, Brunt, Monument, Davidson, Harrison, Wilson, Ings and Tidd were sent under cavalry escort to the Tower, where Captain J H Elrington, the fort-major, was waiting for them. As they waited for the carriages to arrive, the conspirators chatted loudly, almost certainly for the benefit of their captors, about the spread of the conspiracy – ‘Aye,’ Harrison laughed, ‘time will show all things.’ As they pulled away in their carriages, Ings called to the crowd, ‘Hurra, boys!’ but the mob was grimly silent in return. They didn’t even giggle at the ludicrous sight of the giant Harrison handcuffed to the diminutive Monument in his wide-awake hat. The mob followed them all the way to the Tower, no one making sympathetic noises at all. And this despite the fact that Ings continued to use the ‘most revolting’ language against the king’s ministers and seemed to know, or pretend to know, various people in the crowd.
At the Tower, each man was accommodated separately and their cells guarded by Yeoman Warders. Thistlewood was placed in the Bloody Tower, possibly in the same cell that was the home of another ‘conspirator’, Walter Ralegh, for fourteen years in the reign of James I. Davidson and Ings were locked in a prison over the waterworks, Monument at the back of the Horse-Armoury, Brunt and Harrison over the Stone-kitchen, Tidd in the Seven-gun Battery and Wilson in the prison over the parade. The number of Yeoman gaolers was increased six-fold to sixty, just in case. After all, the Tower had been a focus of attack three years earlier and no one was taking any chances.
Bradburn, Shaw, Firth, Gilchrist, Hall and Cooper, probably always regarded as second-string conspirators, were taken under cavalry escort to Coldbath Fields. Simmonds the footman and Preston were sent to Tothill Fields and no warrant for murder was ever brought against them.
Sweeping up operations were still going on. Robert George was presumed to be a gang member. He was a haberdasher and tailor of Chapel Street, Paddington, and a little boy playing in the street had lost a marble that rolled into George’s premises. Here, the lad saw guns and a sword and immediately told the authorities. George’s son, who lived opposite, had disappeared on the night of Cato Street and he was traced by Runners Ruthven and Salmon2 to the Dundee Arms, Wapping, where the ex-sailor was waiting for a ship to Gravesend. Despite nothing incriminating being found on him apart from a stick which might be used as a pike handle, he was placed in the House of Correction at Coldbath Fields on a charge of high treason.
The premises of all the conspirators were searched with a fine-tooth comb. Susan Thistlewood, ‘a smart, genteel little woman’, backed her husband’s political stance 100 per cent. She was calm and dignified as officers turned her lodgings over and was patience itself when she visited her husband and was body-searched ‘even to the removal of her stays and cap’.
Preparations for the trials began on 8 March with a Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer3 set for the 27th. On that day, twenty-three gentlemen forming a Grand Jury met at Hicks’ Hall at 9 o’clock. Lord Chief Justice Abbott explained to them the exact meaning of treason, a tedious recitation which would be repeated and argued over several times in the weeks ahead. Very properly, Abbott reminded the jury that they were to reach their conclusions on evidence only, not on the wild rumours which were no doubt flying all over the country by now.
A number of witnesses were called, Robert Adams the conspiratorturned-traitor sitting for three hours in the witness box before being returned to Coldbath Fields. John Monument from the Tower was very uneasy, ‘pale and dejected’, and generally seems to have been of a gloomy disposition. Several women and two boys were examined. The deliberations lasted for two days and at the end of them the Grand Jury decided that ‘true bills’ of high treason be brought against Thistlewood, Davidson, Ings, Brunt, Tidd, Wilson, Harrison, Bradburn, Shaw, Gilchrist and Cooper. These bills were not found for Robert George and Abel Hall. In the case of the Smithers’s murder, true bills were brought against Thistlewood, Brunt, Tidd, Wilson, Harrison and Shaw. At first, Davidson was not included in this, but the oversight was corrected by an emergency session of the Grand Jury in which Davidson was accused of shooting at Runner Gill with the intent to murder him.
On Monday 3 April, a list of 227 potential jurors of the county of Middlesex was drawn up and the four-count indictment drafted. The first count of high treason was that the conspirators
did compass, imagine, invent, devise and intend to deprive and depose our said lord the King of and from the style, honour and kingly
name of the imperial crown of this realm.
This would have been achieved by eleven ‘overt acts’, including conspiracy to assassinate the Cabinet, seizure and manufacture of weapons, attacks on barracks and so on. In fact, a reading of the acts implies a great deal of repetition, as though the authorities were determined to bring these men to book by charging them with every crime under the sun.
The second count involved the intent
to move and excite insurrection, rebellion and war against the King . . . and to subvert and alter the legislature, rule and government and to bring and put the King to death.
The same eleven overt acts were cited as proof, even though in the evidence that was to follow there was only one oblique mention of an attack on the life of George IV.
The third count consisted of an intent
to levy war against the King, in order by force and constraint to compel him to change his measures and councils.
The overt acts were cited here, as in the first two.
The fourth and final count makes mention of the fact that the conspirators had made war against the king, which was merely a continuation of the intent in count three. Later discussions explained to a confused jury that ‘war’ in this context meant rebellion.4
An astonishing 162 witnesses were called upon to be in readiness, although in practice only a third of those were actually called. Adams, the cordwainer-conspirator heads the alphabetical list. Several of Ruthven’s Runners are there, as are magistrates like Birnie, Captain Fitzclarence and several of his piquet, Yeoman Warders of the Tower, witnesses to the Cato Street night and a scattering of His Majesty’s Ministers.
